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We talk about the benefits of gardening for mental health, its rise in popularity during COVID, and lessons we can learn from gardening in our lives.
Show Notes
Keith: Today, I’m talking about gardening for mental health. There are lots of articles out there more about gardening and how good it is for mental health. Something I figured out a long time ago for myself personally, not recognizing it, but no matter how bad a day I’d had, if I got out in the garden, touch the soil serotonin levels, go crazy in your body. It’s an easy place to relax.
[00:01:06] Keith:. Yep. So golfing, golfing has gone crazy. Gardening has gone crazy. The basics: you walk out of the house, and oxygen levels improve. When older people used to tell me they needed to get out in the sun and get some vitamin D to me, it was sounded like a lot of fluff.
[00:01:24]The older you get, I think the more vitamin D deficient you end up and, I feel totally different when the sun comes out, it’s the landscape looks brighter. Everything around you looks better. It’s, it just feels you feel so much better to be outside. So you say you’re breathing better oxygen, fresher air getting more sun.
[00:01:42]The other thing about gardening is just practicing acceptance. Stress, a lot of times, comes from trying to schedule and control everything around you. There’s, there’s only a certain amount of stuff that you can control in the landscape. It’s mother nature.
[00:01:56] That works. Yeah. You can do your part, but then what happens. You’re out there, and there’s a lot of different components to it. You may be looking at your vegetable garden, and two vegetables are failing miserably. It’s gotten too hot, and there’s nothing you can do to cool them off.
[00:02:14] Joe: yeah. And if you have a high-stress job or something, I’ve heard people say that it helps you slow down, but I don’t know if it’s slow. It just helps you embrace the fact that. This is how long it takes. Like these things take how long they take.
[00:02:25]And it’s I like that word that you’re using. I think it’s more about acceptance than forcing you to slow down. Yeah,
[00:02:30] Keith: absolutely. And maybe it’s why I’m good at gardening. I’m not a control person at all. My management style is to point you in the right direction.
[00:02:41] Just let that ship sail. And I’ll come back around in about a week or two or a month to write that to that ship if it’s, heading in the wrong direction. But I tend to let you know, let things go, and let the way they turn out.
[00:02:56] So it makes gardening fun. It’s like being in the studio today. We’ve got a, we’ve got a bluebird that’s right at the window. And you’ve been trying to get in for the last 20 minutes knocking noise. It’s not the door. It’s the window. Hold the mic over there. Next time he tries it.
[00:03:14] Yeah. He’s he thinks that he’s got another bluebird in the reflection, so he’s mad. He’s not pumping up his chest. He wants to fight. He’s not happy at all. And you could try to change that, but probably not going to happen. So we’re going to, we’re going to live with our little friend.
[00:03:31]As far as accepting what’s going to happen, you do what you can do. You prepare the best you can come, prepare, prepare the soil, get the plants, the right best plants, and then accept the results. Do you know what I mean?
[00:03:43] That’s life, and it’s harder for some people than others, but gardening is a good way to learn that and practice. The other thing is, letting go of the idea that things are going to be perfect. Vegetable gardening, in particular, There’s lots of highs and lows.
[00:03:56] It’s, you get it in you till the garden everything’s fresh and pretty. And then. You get, come back a month later, and certain plants are doing better than others. Things are starting to produce fruit or greens, or you can start to harvest things. But it’s never going to be perfect.
[00:04:09]And then at the end of the season, it’s, you’re pulling out dead plants that are still producing but don’t look good and are near nearing the end. So just getting used to the fact that things aren’t perfect. The fixed mindset or growth mindset. When you make mistakes, it’s a growth opportunity.
[00:04:24] It’s not worrying about it, especially vegetable gardening or landscape gardening. I think it’s always good to get good advice. Especially when you’re talking about trees or talking about Woody plants larger projects so that you don’t make as many mistakes. Still, when it comes to perennial garden or flower gardening, growing a vegetable garden, it's
[00:04:42]Fun to go out there and experiment, try this, and try something else if it doesn’t work. That’s part of that whole growth thing. And while you’re going through all these processes, it’s It being outside, in general, is just a fun, fun place to unwind. Yeah.
[00:04:57] Joe: so many options that we have when it comes to spending our time. And so many of them in our culture feel like they have immediate results. Like I want to watch this movie so I can escape reality for two and a half hours, or I want to go shopping so that I have the thing that I want, but gardening is seasonal at the end of the trip.
[00:05:10] Like you have to think about it in terms of it’s going to be this year. I want to do this thing. Yeah. Which is a completely different mindset to put ourselves in than we normally are in.
[00:05:20] Keith: Yeah, it is. And it’s I’ve got a friend that just passed several months ago and every summer he would plant every spring he planted a huge garden and he, he called me, and he’d say, I need corn and I needed, silver queen corn. I’m growing silver queen this year. It’s butter corn. And I would provide him with all the seeds because he lives in Virginia, and we’d go to the Lake in Virginia, and then I could help him pick the garden. In every fall, as the corn dwindled and the raccoons ate the corn one year, he had a bear rolling around in the corn.
[00:05:49]He would say, I’m not growing a garden again. It’s I’m done with this. He said, you can buy corn at the farmer’s market cheaper than you can, then you can plant and garden, and when May rolls around, and he’d call me, and he’d say, I want to quit and plowed that garden. And he said, this year, I think I’m going to use buttercream corn, or, he would, it would be something else.
[00:06:10] By the end of the season, things weren’t looking that great in the fall. And they were all drying up, he was feeling the feeling and the downside of gardening and, but give him a couple of months to rest in the wintertime, and he’d be right back at it.
[00:06:22]Yeah. And then, and then you get those re you reap there the rewards of their, fresh silver queen corn, you’re pulling out of your garden. It’s just after the crop has gone, and he would kind of get down about it all or anything that had gone wrong, or that thing about that darn bear.
[00:06:39] Keith: it again. I’ll do it one more time. Yeah. So I fell last time. It’s good. My new I’m like, I’ll do it. I’ll try it one more time. Talking about my friend that the other one of the other points to the whole mental health is the connection to other humans.
[00:06:55] That’s some people have a hard time making connections. I seem to be able to talk to anybody well that I run into walking down the street. Now it feels I’m talking when people, even when they’re not there. When there’s nobody around, I’d be talking to the plant or the tree, but doing that human connection gardening is it’s one of those things people come together to talk about online these days.
[00:07:15] I There’s all these gardening groups in the Triangles. All these people that are on there are all avid gardeners. People who love houseplants love vegetable gardening, and they’re exchanging information, or they’re exchanging plants, trading plants back and forth.
[00:07:27]So it’s a good way to make connections and make good friends make good long-term friends. I think when you go out, and you feel the soil and plants, it’s a, yeah, it’s that whole full circle realm.
[00:07:42] You go out, and you plant plants, and you fertilize plants and And then, we all end up back in the soil at the end of our life. So it’s a full-circle kind of scenario that, that we participate in. There’s a Japanese saying, “showering yourself in green.”
[00:07:56]It helps you recover and raises serotonin levels faster for recovery from surgery, less anxiety, less depression, and better stress management. And I think that’s a lot of what we see right now. Houseplants sales are through the roof. Many of the younger population haven’t figured out gardening or haven’t bought a house yet don’t own a piece of earth to plan in.
[00:08:19] So they’re doing more house plants and green in their house. And I think that’s a big part of it is, when you have green in your house, it’s just more relaxing. It’s the green that makes you settle down and take a deep breath and manage stresses better. The Japanese call it forresting, being immersed in green.
[00:08:37]Which I think, from the beginning of time, they would do it to relax, take it easy. Another thing is just being present. It’s a good time to put down the phone, turn off the music turn off the podcast. If podcast, if you’re driving and you want to.
[00:08:51]You want to learn more if you want to be relaxed and be able to focus on the road now. But when you go, when you get out in the garden, that’s a good time to turn everything off and just put the phone down and listen to the birds, listen to the bees thing, the w, and, and the wind chimes, maybe you sit in nature, and you get a sense of calm, it’s a perfect time just to be relaxed.
[00:09:12]Physical exercise is another thing. You go to the gym, and you do an exercise. You’re working one muscle or several muscles, and you’re doing it repetitively. It’s a good strength, it’s a good time to strengthen those muscles, but it’s very specific.
[00:09:26]The physical exercise of gardening is, you’re working lots of different muscles, so you’re strengthening your entire body. You’re moving your arms in a lot of different ways. You’re lifting various weights or just even lifting a shovel and pushing it back into the ground over and over.
[00:09:39]But from lots of different angles. So it’s a great way to reduce anxiety, boost your spirits.
[00:09:45] Stress-reducing of the garden. When you touch the soil, and then you can go out and load the serotonin levels, they’ve done lots of studies on this. A lot of mental health facilities will have gardening for that reason. All older retirement homes and aging people will have raised gardens and situations because the serotonin levels go crazy.
[00:10:05]When you touch the soil for some reason or another, you’ll instantly start feeling better. And then you’re like we said before, you’re breathing fresher air. You’re getting your vitamin D, and when it’s a sunny day and then the reward from gardening, you go out there, day in, day out, know, or once a week the beautiful view from your house, the fresh veggies that you grow, where they came from, what kind of fertilizer you used on them?
[00:10:28] You know how they were grown. They weren’t sprayed. And if they were sprayed, you know what they were sprayed with, you use mineral oil or something. That’s not that really is it, isn’t gonna affect your health. Its fresh veggies are you can pick them 15 minutes before you eat them or the day before you eat them.
[00:10:42] It’s not something that’s been shipped all over the place. So he’s, you’re getting the veggies or your flowers, your fresh cut flowers. You’ve planted them in the spring, and now you’re seeing the rewards of them. And the more you cut them, a lot of times, the more flowers you get.
[00:10:55]You go out, and it’s not all work. It’s going out, collect a few flowers, bring them into the house. Fragrant flowers are another one. Having the fragrant flowers spaced out just that fragrance when you walk by is just a, it’s an inviting thing. I always tell people when they plant fragrant flowers to plant them, three or four different places in the yard.
[00:11:12] So that from an exposure standpoint, they bloom a little earlier, a little later. It extends your season, but it also smells different fragrances as you walk through the yard. There are fragrances like Rosemary. That aromatherapy kind of feeling when you walk by Rosemary and brush your hand across it and then bring it to your, bring it to your nose that fresh smell of Rosemary.
[00:11:35]And if you look at the Any of the bath products right now, or candles now, and a new scent that you’ll see out there. And the fresh smell of Bazell in the garden is kind of hard to be, it’s just a reviving kind of scent, but generally speaking, I think that there are a hundred reasons to garden.
[00:11:53]I think that the people when they when people figure out how. Good. It makes you feel, and how much benefit comes from it? I think we could all stand to use a little more time in the garden.
Creators and Guests
What is In The Garden?
In the Garden with Keith Ramsey is a podcast aimed at helping you grow and maintain a beautiful and healthy garden and landscape.
Each podcast will focus on a new specific topic. Check back every two weeks for the latest episode!